


The Journey of a Malcontent

by DJClawson



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Backstory, Blind Cecil, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-14
Updated: 2013-11-16
Packaged: 2018-01-01 13:55:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,373
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1044751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DJClawson/pseuds/DJClawson
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Carlsberg has not always been happy <i>with</i> Night Vale, but he has always been happy <i>in</i> Night Vale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Child

**Author's Note:**

> This work is unrelated to my "Child of the Cosmos" series.

The Journey of a Malcontent

By DJ Clawson

Steve is three. Maybe four. His best friend is Cecil Palmer. He does not know yet that this was a happy accident. They were born four weeks apart and their parents lived on the same street. They were at each other’s first birthday parties for the sake of convenience. Night Vale is a small town.

Cecil’s mother either works for or is worked on by the government. Later, when Steve is old enough to make the distinction, he will be unable to determine which. She is a single mother. Cecil cannot be left alone with his brother; that is dangerous for Cecil, so Cecil’s mom starts dropping him off at random intervals at Steve’s house, and Steve’s parents think he could use the company. They are not from Night Vale so they are not very popular and don’t have other friends to share their kids with.

Cecil is fun to have around. He never wants to watch television. He wants to color or run around outside. Sometimes he just sits in the sandbox and doesn’t ask for anything if Steve does want to watch television. He doesn’t ask to play with every shiny new toy Steve has and he doesn’t eat his crayons. That’s all you really need in a friend.

Steve does not remember ever not knowing about Cecil. His mother tells him when he’s older that he did ask once, and his father tied a handkerchief over his eyes and told him to wear it for an hour, to see what Cecil’s life was like. Steve learns that utensils are hard to use and television is boring when you can’t see.

~~~

Steve is six. He is in first grade. Cecil is not. Cecil goes to a special school in some place called Juneau. He doesn’t know where it is – he isn’t _allowed_ to know where it is – but Cecil has to ride an hour in the car each morning to get there and an hour to get back. He misses local activities. He comes home tired and cranky. He hates school, he says. The kids do not understand the things he says and make fun of him. It is freezing there too.

“If I give Cecil one eye, can he go to normal school?” Steve says at the dinner table one night. He covers up his left eye. “I like the right one better. He can have the left one.”

“You cannot give Cecil an eye. Any kind of eye,” his mother says patiently. “It won’t work in his head. The problem is with the wires that connect the wires to his brain. It’s all very complicated. If the doctors could give him eyes that worked, they would. Cecil is a citizen of Night Vale. That means the government and the City Council has a responsibility to provide for him so he can have the same chances as everyone else.”

“But he doesn’t have the same chances! He doesn’t go to normal school! He goes to a bad school where everything is cold and kids beat him up.” He bangs his work on the table, something his parents told him not to do. “I want to ask the City Council to let Cecil into normal school.”

“Honey, your concern is very sweet,” his mother say, patting his head but also taking the fork out of his hands before he does any real damage, “but you’re not allowed to talk directly to the City Council. No one is. You know that. We have to offer proper sacrifices before submitting a letter by pigeon carrier.”

 

So Steve writes a letter – his first complaint letter. It reads:

> _Dear City Cowncel,_
> 
> _My name is Steven Carlsberg and I am a citisin of Night Vale. My frend Cecil Palmer is also a citisin of Night Vale. But he is not aloud to go to schoul because he is blind. He shud be aloud to go to schoul even tho he is blind. It is unfare not to let him go to schoul with me. All citisins shud be treated ekwally._
> 
> _Love,_
> 
> _Steven Carlsberg_

He signs is “love” because he has only ever signed birthday cards and because he does not know how to spell “sincerely” and is too embarrassed to ask.

His parents say they mailed it while he was at school. He does not believe them, and writes a second letter, this one to the sheriff, and hands it to the secret policeman who is stationed in the bushes near his window while he sleeps.

When this fails, he writes a third letter to the principal of “the head of the schoul sistem” (because he is afraid to write to the actual principal and he doesn’t know who is above her) and gives it to his mother to deliver at the PTA meeting. She said she is proud of him but he has to stop writing letters. When he refuses, she brings him to a PTA meeting, which is long and boring and about traffic cones and despair but he finally gets to read his letter to the school board and everyone claps.

The following year, Cecil joins Steve in the second grade.

~~~

Steve is nine.

He is not picked for scouts. There is no scarlet envelope, no agonizing sobs from his parents, and no new uniform to wear. Even though Steve doesn’t like the uniforms, he is still a little upset. He is not cool enough for scouts. They will learn all kinds of things, some of which will be lame but many which will be secret and probably awesome.

He goes over to Cecil’s house. Cecil is coloring. He says he can sense color, even though Steve doesn’t think Cecil is right in “sensing” which color is which, because he doesn’t really know what colors are. But Cecil insists that the colors feel different, and that’s why he uses different crayons at different times, and the walls are covered in his drawings. They’re mostly blobs and strange shapes, but sometimes they look beautiful.

“I didn’t get picked for scouts,” Steve says.

“Oh.” Cecil’s head is down because he’s still concentrating on his coloring, so his voice is a little muffled. “I was worried that everyone but me was going to be picked.”

Of course, Cecil can’t go to scouts, Steve realizes, and it makes him angry on principle. He wouldn’t be able to get some of the badges, and most of his free time is taken up by his tutor reading him the textbooks or teaching him how to use the computer the city gave him. “Everyone should be allowed to go to scouts if they want to.”

“Then there wouldn’t be any excitement in being picked, would there?” Cecil is always more understanding of stupid things in Night Vale. “If it makes you feel better, I’m glad you weren’t picked.”

It does make Steve feel better.

~~~

Steve is fifteen. He goes to his first real dance with his first real date, Fatima. The slow dancing is more like standing around and shuffling their feet and Steve says some things he assumes are stupid later. Cecil tells him he is just in love, even though Steve promised himself he wouldn’t fall in love with a childhood sweetheart and get her knocked up and never leave town because that is the _worst_. Cecil goes with Earl, who has slimmed down from his years in scouts and is at least presentable, even if he wears that damn uniform to the dance. Steve is very happy to rant about it on the ride home. Cecil laughs and says he didn’t notice, but he obviously did because he had his hands on Earl all night.

It is the year Cecil goes missing. One day he has an internship at Night Vale Community Radio, the next he’s gone. Steve didn’t even has a chance to talk him out of it. Steve got a computer for his birthday, and he’s preparing angry emails on Prodigy internet when his father tells him to cool it, Cecil is alive. His mother and brother are gone, though, and his father makes it sound like it’s for good even though Cecil’s mom does go away for long periods of time.

“I know you have a lot of questions,” his father says, “but let’s just wait for answers, okay?” His voice is trembling. Steve has already been to re-education a few times that he is aware of. He has a record. They go easy on kids, but he’s not going to stay a minor forever. His parents have never told him what adult re-education is about, but he knows it involves more than watching videos with his eyes taped open. He thinks he’s memorized one of the videos.

Steve sits on his hands and listens to Leonard Burton’s show every night. He’s gotten into the habit anyway because Cecil has always loved radio for obvious reasons. But Leonard doesn’t talk about Cecil. He only once mentions an intern, to speak of her passing.

After two weeks, the police officer assigned to the Carlsberg house comes in to speak to his parents. Steve is called down and Officer Miller looks stern, and his parents look worried.

“Steven,” Officer Miller says with some familiarity, even though they’ve rarely spoken. Steve hates being called Steven and Officer Miller definitely knows that. “Mr. Palmer is coming back to school tomorrow, and there’s a few things I’d like to go over with you before you see him. This is very important. Do you understand?”

Steve understands perfectly. He understands it so much he hates it.

Cecil’s mother is gone. That is how Steve is going to refer to her now – not “dead” or “lost” or anything else. And Cecil’s brother never existed, and is not to be spoken of ever again. They’re on those bulletin boards. Switching to Compuserve isn’t going to trick them. While Steve isn’t sad to see Cecil’s psycho brother go, it’s hard to keep from thinking about something and he resents that he’s being told to do so. Also, Cecil never worked at the radio station. This is all very important. Steve realizes the meeting won’t end until he signs a form saying he understands all of this and will comply with the police. He feels more guilty than angry when he does. Cecil would never betray him like this. Cecil is loyal to Night Vale but he is a loyal friend. He is the best friend Steve ever had.

After that, things get fuzzy. He must have done something the next day, or maybe the day after that, but it hurts to remember it. He barely remembers the rest of the school year. He gets grades back on exams he doesn’t remember taking. People have stopped talking to him. He quit all of his clubs, he’s told. He remembers being in the nurse’s office a lot with bad headaches and twice, a seizure. He is told there will be more seizures if he thinks too hard about them.

Cecil is there with him, somehow. Cecil has changed but he is still Cecil. He is in foster care, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His voice has finally changed like, overnight, into a deep, smooth tone that sounds like velvet. He reads the morning announcements. He does not ask about his mother. Steve feels like Cecil should have more questions and that the answers shouldn’t be so hard to get at, but he can barely focus on anything when he’s sitting alone. His parents fight a lot when they think he can’t hear them. They talk about leaving Night Vale but they don’t say why. There’s no reason to say why. They all know. 

~~~

Steve is seventeen. His parents have not left Night Vale, but there have been other changes. They talk a little bit more about their life before Night Vale. They are allowed to discuss whatever he wants to know about applying to college outside of Night Vale. He has the grades for a scholarship from City Hall. The town is good to them, they remind him.

They are very generous for his birthday and get him a car. It’s not a an expensive car. He’s a teenager; it would be dumb to spend money on a nice car. The car is a used tan corolla with four different hubcaps and a passenger-side door that is another color entirely and clearly came from another car. The shocks are bad, the breaks are bad, and he has to signal with his hand if he wants to make a left turn because the light doesn’t work, but it’s _his_. His friends forgive him for whatever slights occur in the past. He is invited to a lot of parties, which always end with him driving out to the scrublands to pick up some people who have passed out there.

Cecil hates the car. He’s never been motion sick before. “My mom used to drive to that town – I don’t remember the name. Where I learned to read and write.”

“You were in a school for the blind. You said it sucked.”

“I do remember that. But I don’t remember being carsick.”

“Whatever. You don’t have to ride.” But Steve takes any excuse he can possibly get to drive the car around and that means chauffeuring Cecil places, even if he has to stop so Cecil can open his door and vomit on the side of the road. He calls it the “Vomit-mobile” or the “Vomitarolla.” He is told the car is tan, but he says tan must be what color vomit is. He still accepts the rides because the public bus situation is terrible and his seeing eye dog was eaten by something that sounded big and squishy and was definitely on his front porch. He thinks.

Sometime that year Steve resumes writing, mostly on his computer but sometimes resorting to a book incorrectly-labeled “dream journal” and a dry-erase marker, which is a marker and not a pen. He just doesn’t post anything online or send it to anyone unless it’s completely harmless. He would develop a code but he could only share it with Cecil, and he doesn’t want Cecil to get in trouble. Whatever Cecil went through, it was enough.

When he finds out the student council has blown all of their money on new machetes that they don’t even intend to use at the jungle-themed prom, he writes an editorial. It is rejected, probably because the editor is on the council and has a very nice leather holster for a machete with him at all times in addition to his sidearm.

“Cecil,” he asks, “can you read this on air? As an anonymous editorial?”

Steve reads it to Cecil, who shakes his head. “I won’t get in trouble, but you’ll get in trouble. Everyone will know who ‘Anonymous’ is.” Steve had a bit of a reputation.

“I thought you wanted to be a hard-hitting journalist? So hit hard. Think of something.”

Cecil does. He reads the letter in its entirety, but he follows it by announcing who the anonymous source is and proceeds to spend a full minute trashing Steve on air, rejecting everything he said and how bad his handwriting is, even if Cecil has no idea what Steve’s handwriting looks like. He’s cut off after that, but he’s only off the air for a day. It works – Steve got to say what he wanted to say and the information got out. They go to Big Rico’s to celebrate.

~~~

Steve is nineteen. He is a student at Caltech.

His first year has been difficult. Leaving Night Vale was difficult. Most of his classmates didn’t even apply anywhere, and entrance to Night Vale community College is guaranteed if you survive the trials of graduation. At some point he tried to talk Cecil into considering leaving, saying that the outside had better technology. Life might be better for him. Cecil wouldn’t even consider it and Steve wasn’t surprised. He gives Cecil possession of his car so people have to at least ask him to use it.

He realizes why they call it “the outside world” – his parents, that is. The sky is always blue, there is so much grass everywhere, and people are different. The way they think of the world is different. The way they think of their lives and what they mean is different. There are so many possibilities. It is easy to find people like him – people who don’t trust the government, people who don’t like society’s means of control, people who think equality is more important than success. They are well-versed and surprisingly naïve at the same time. They are sure people are spying on them when for the first time in Steve’s life, _no one is_. They cannot tell a valid theory from nonsense. They have so much information that they don’t know what to do with it, so they do nothing. They talk of revolution and protests and letter-writing campaigns and it all goes up in a big puff of weed, and Steve realizes it has always been like this, and it will always be like this.

He learns that people can be awful. They can be nice on the outside but hate people for no reason, or stupid reasons, like the color of someone’s skin or the way they talk or who they are attracted to. It baffles him. When he tells them that, even in confidence, it amuses them and they say he must be from Oz, or Abadon, or some other magical place of wishful thinking. Steve has never thought of Night Vale like that before. They think he comes from Candyland and he thinks their lives have no stakes, and have never had stakes. They have never fallen asleep hiding in the bathtub and holding a rifle for perfectly good reasons. They have never sacrificed anything, much less a limb, a family member, or themselves. No one has ever _really_ told them how to think or tried to change something inherent about them. The only people struggling are the work-study students slaving away in the cafeteria and in other humiliating jobs, but no one’s fighting for them. The only campaign Steve can put his heart into after that first year of disillusionment is a fight to raise the minimum wage for university employees. He has never known anyone – _anyone_ \- who worked hard and could not make ends meet. He has never taken so much for granted.

Summers are very complicated. If he goes home, he spends time in a brief, painless, but still-annoying re-education learning what he can and can talk about. His school books are confiscated and so is his laptop. He will get them back when he leaves in August.

At dinner that first night he asks a question he knows they have been waiting for all his life. “Why did you move to Night Vale?”

“I came to Juneau for work,” his father says. “We’re from the Southwest, so we couldn’t stand the weather there.”

“I just remember our toes were freezing all the time,” his mother says.

“We heard there was some strange microclimate out west so ... we came to visit, and we stayed. You know how it is.” People did not pass through Night Vale. They showed up for a reason, which was usually the end of their life. “We did try to leave once. Cecil’s father pulled a purple card from the bag and they chopped up his body and threw him to the wolves. You were maybe three months old.”

“I was devastated,” his mother adds. “I didn’t know him that well, but he was a neighbor, and he had a little boy, just like you. A boy with special needs and a mother who obviously couldn’t really care for him. But when we tried to leave, we just kept circling back to the exit of Route 800. So we went City Hall and applied for an exit visa.”

“They said _we_ could leave,” his father says, “but we couldn’t take you. We said we wanted to leave for your safety, and the mayor took us to see these granite tablets. They took up the whole room. All runes, but we could read them. They told us your future. Our future, together, as a family in Night Vale. To a scared young couple it was – wonderful, I guess. To know that you were going to be okay and you were going to be bright and thrive in your own way and Night Vale was going to protect you. We would see you grow up and go to school and go to college and ... well, some other things that we can’t say. We shouldn’t have even told you this but hell, I’ve been through re-education so many times I can’t remember it!” His father actually chuckled. “So we stayed. Do you think we made the wrong decision?”

To his own surprise Steve says, “No.”

  
To be continued...


	2. Adult

Steve is twenty-one. He is graduating with a computer science degree from Caltech. Magna cum laude. His parents leave Night Vale for the first time in twenty-one years to see the ceremony. He has job offers from Microsoft as well as some start-ups as well as scholarships for a PhD. The world is open to him. It seems that way, anyway, and he wonders if it really is. His parents tell him to explore his options, so he flies to Seattle to interview there. He visits the East Coast – Princeton, Harvard, MIT. By now he knows his way around. He knows the game that the real world plays. He stays in cheap motels to save money and he lies awake at night and he has never been more homesick in his life. He has not made it this far not to know he stands at the most important crossroad of his life. For the first time he is well and truly scared of something intangible.

He calls Cecil. Somehow he gets through. “What would you say if I took a job out here? If I never come back to Night Vale?”

Cecil sounds sleep-deprived even though it is three hours earlier where he is. “I think you know what I would say. And then what I would say about you on student radio.”

“I want a real answer.”

Cecil sighs. “I can tell you what you said all the time when we were kids. You were going to get out of here and go somewhere sane, where the police didn’t watch you and your mom didn’t make coffee for the man in the tree outside your window. You were going to find some girl who was an intellectual who read Proust and Kant and Howard Zinn. Not a communist, but you’d settle for a socialist or a libertarian. Also she was going to be beautiful.” Cecil chuckles. “If we go back far enough, she was going to be a pretty princess too.”

“Cecil – “

“You also wanted to live somewhere where free speech was an inalienable right, and authority was respected rather than feared, and something about how the City Council was also dumping chemicals on us for some reason and that’s what clouds are and that’s why we’re not allowed to talk about them. I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying this.”

On his end of the line, Steve squirmed. “Tell them it’s my fault, because it is. You would never say these things.”

“But I guess it was more about what you didn’t say,” Cecil continued. “You got all that stuff when you went to California, right? The free speech and the privacy and the right to protest? And you met intelligent women who had read things that would never ever be on our approved reading list? But you never talked about them or brought any of them home. Whatever you were doing there, you didn’t seem proud of the place or proud of your time there. People might have mistaken it for I don’t know, your usual curmudgeon-ness - ”

“That’s not a word.”

“ – but it wasn’t. You were doing what you wanted but you weren’t happy. You were missing something. Night Vale’s god is a jealous god, Steve.”

Steve is almost twenty-two years old, and he is trying not to cry. Cecil gives him time.

“If I said you should get out of Night Vale – just for a little while – would you do it? You’re the one who wants to be a reporter.”

“I do say that,” Cecil replies. “I came into some money when I turned twenty-one. Left over from my mother. I’m thinking about going to Europe.”

“Really?”

“I can’t lie. I have my integrity as a journalist on the line.”

It makes Steve smile.

~~~

Steve is twenty-five. He has been back in Night Vale for three years. He writes code for corporations that have interests in Night Vale but never Strexcorp. He takes one job for a vague-yet-menacing government agency and in exchange he receives a permit to have an unmonitored computer in his home. He is living in an apartment because he is single, but if he needed a home he could afford one. Night Vale provides for its own.

He cannot say firmly when Cecil returned, nor can he pinpoint where Cecil went, but neither of these things really surprise him. Cecil seems vague in the particulars too, the sign of a thorough re-education. He is happy to be back, but not happy to face Earl, who he practically left at the altar on his way out the door.

“It wasn’t as dramatic as _that_ ,” Cecil says with a wave of his hand. “I guess at some point I fell out of love with him, and it took the prospect of marriage to realize that. Plus there was so much paperwork to fill out. He felt we should keep going because we _had something_ , as he put it, and even though we did, that wasn’t good enough to keep going. I don’t want to _keep going_. I want to live my life.”

Steve has the same sense of being on a treadmill. Even though his career is secure, he isn’t really moving forward in any other areas. He wants to live in a small town but he doesn’t want to date a small town girl. He _does_ want someone well-read, or at least willing to look through the unapproved book collection in the crawlspace of his parents’ attic. “If I got permission to travel out of Night Vale – for work – would you come with?”

“Oh, no no. I’ve had enough of that. Did you hear Leonard Burton’s retiring?”

“He hasn’t said anything about it.”

“He wouldn’t talk about it in the show, but yes, he is.” Cecil’s face is filled with glee and he doesn’t say the secret, which is not really a secret. Then he grows more serious. “Can I ask you a favor? And before you say it, you don’t have to say yes.”

“What is it?”

“My last emergency contact when I was in Night Vale was Earl so ...” Cecil wears a metal bracelet on his wrist with a phone number to call. Theoretically it’s only for emergencies but unofficially, Cecil needs someone to drive him around if he needs to get to mandatory civic events and the public buses are exploded or invisible or stuck in another dimension, which is often. “You have a car.” It is not the Corolla. That was eaten whole by a sandworm looking for spices. “But I know it’s a lot of responsi – “

“Sure.”

“What?”

“Yes, I’ll do it,” Steve says, wondering why Cecil thinks this needs so much discussion. “Just don’t call me at two in the morning because you can’t walk the three blocks home because you’re _drunk_.”

“I would never do that.”

Cecil does it the following week.

~~~

Steve is twenty-eight. He is getting married. Cecil is his best man.

He is doing what he said he wouldn’t do and marrying someone from Night Vale. His high school crush, Betty. The girl he was too scared to ever ask out. He has never been engaged before. He was serious with one girl in college, but he never felt he could bring her to Night Vale safely, and she wanted him to live with her, so he never brought her home and no one met her.

Betty is not as he remembered her. They had not spoken in a decade, more if you count the fact that he was too shy to actually speak to her directly even though they were in the same classes, but he finds her in a bookstore in Juneau and stares in disbelief and she has to come up to _him_. Even though Steve has the internet and a Kindle reader, he still likes books, especially old ones that show that their ideas have been shared with others, so he drives to the nearest decent store about once a month. They will special order Braille books that he will gift to Cecil in the hopes that he will read them. Cecil occasionally does – except the _Warren Commission Report_ , which he understandably scoffs at because of the length. He adds, “It was probably that guy they arrested who had means and motive and a recently-fired gun, right? There’s like no other feasible suspects?” Eventually the words “Warren” or “Oswald” become Cecil code for “I want to throw Steve into a rage for no reason, or possibly to get him off the topic he was previously ranting about.”

Betty has no interest in the Warren Commission, but she does like history books. She teaches a history class, but that means she knows a lot about ammunition and the history books are a hobby. Steve says he had no idea. He never would have guessed.

“That’s kind of the point,” she says, putting a finger over her lips. She’s been smuggling in books for years. For their one-month anniversary, Steve gets her a license for the importation of written materials from City Hall, via the vague-yet-menacing government agency he takes a job for precisely to get that piece of paper.

She has never traveled, really traveled. Never been outside of Alaska, though she does know she’s in the state of Alaska, which is a hell of a lot of knowledge for a native Night Valian. She wants to travel but then she wants to come home.

Their love is not sudden but it is very real, and it goes very deep. “I always knew you were a sweetheart, even when you were acting like a paranoid weirdo,” she tells him on their trip to Anchorage, “because you were so nice to Cecil, even after all he said about you in the announcements. And still does.”

“Oh, no. That’s a bit,” he says, slightly embarrassed. “He’s not really mad at me. He has never been mad at me, even if we disagree. He’s just the only one who will read my letters, but he can only do it if he bashes them or he’ll get in trouble. Or that’s how it started. Do people not know that? I guess we never told anyone.”

Betty is honored to be in on the joke.

They go to Europe for their honeymoon – the _real_ Europe, whatever Cecil says about it. Then they come home and build a life together. They will raise their children in Night Vale after all. Their children will learn silly things at school but also how to protect themselves. There are no Amber alerts in Night Vale. No one has even heard of them. Their children will not be afraid of people putting razor blades in apples on Halloween, or be told about stranger danger, or have trouble finding a police officer if they are lost. They will treat everyone equally no matter where they are from or what they look like or if they have an extra head or a fluorescent body. The sky above them will not always be the same color but it will always be beautiful.

Steve is satisfied with that.

~~~

Steve is thirty-two. He is a White Hat – someone who is asked to break into computers to find flaws in the security systems and recommend fixes. He likes the work. He especially likes hacking surveillance equipment. It is useful knowledge for him to have. His work provides him with a lot of perks involving internet and intellectual freedom within his own home. He wishes it was more, of course. He wishes he did not have to speak his mind through a filter of Cecil’s feigned indignation. He wishes people other than Cecil and Betty took him seriously, and he knows sometimes they are just humoring him. Cecil in particular has to watch what he says because of his radio job, which he loves more than anything, at least until Carlos comes into town.

“‘Teeth like a military cemetery?’” Steve says when Cecil comes over for dinner. “Really?”

“I’m told he has very good teeth. Fantastic teeth.”

“It’s just an obtuse metaphor. And how do you even know –”

“You don’t think he’ll be offended, will he?”

Before Cecil can be even more horrified, Betty puts a hand on his shoulder and says, “It was a very beautiful way to say it. I think Steve is trying to say that he’s impressed with your choice of words. I have seen a military cemetery and his teeth do look like that. Maybe a little whiter? Steve?”

“He had nice teeth,” Steve relents.

“He was very handsome. Steve, you found him handsome, right? We were talking about it?”

Steve has never really felt a need to call a man handsome before, but even he can admit, “Yes. He was objectively handsome. Cecil, you better scoop him up before my wife does.”

Cecil is in love – _really_ in love – for the first time. Everyone in town would be able to tell even if he didn’t announce it, but now Steve thanks the Flying Spaghetti Monster that Cecil broke off his engagement with Earl.

Cecil does not know this, apparently, but Carlos is a biochemist specializing in radiobiology. Steve knows because he asks. He swings by the lab very early in Carlos’s stay, after the scientist has survived a couple months without being transformed, deformed, or driven to madness in some way. Steve offers to take him out to lunch. Carlos is filled with questions about the town; at this point in his life Steve knows which to answer and which not to answer, and how to tell Carlos that there’s a difference, even though the scientist seems a bit slow to catch on to that. Carlos doesn’t really know who he is until Cecil’s name comes into the conversation.

“Are you that guy who Cecil – “

“Yes, he complains about everything I do. What was it this week? Bad scones or something.”

“I – I don’t remember exactly.” But Carlos is blushing. Carlos does remember because he has been listening to the radio, whatever ignorance he may claim. “But it was something about a PTA meeting.”

“I haven’t made scones in years. I made them ... oh right, I remember. I tried to make them when I was a kid, but we were out of baking powder, and I thought baking soda would be just as good, and they came out terrible. Not that Cecil was any help.” He shakes his head. “We were allowed to use the oven, but I can’t imagine we were older than eight or nine. Wow, he really put his back into that one, remembering the scones.”

“You were friends?”

“We _are_ friends,” Steve corrects. This is Cecil’s true love, so Steve is going to be patient with the flustered newcomer. “The thing on the radio, it’s a running joke. He’s gotten more creative over the years. He mentioned the Corolla too, didn’t he? To be fair, he did hate that car. It had really bad shocks and I couldn’t afford to get it fixed. It was a rough ride and it made him sick. But it was high school, and when you’ve only got one friend with one crappy car, you deal.” He is amused by Carlos’s expression. “You don’t believe me? Ask Cecil. Just not when he’s in the station.”

“I’m – I haven’t spoken to him much. Just those two times.” Carlos is not lying very well, but that’s okay. It’s a good kind of lie. There are few of those in Night Vale.

It takes Carlos a long time to get his shit together, but when he does, Cecil is happy and Steve is happy for him. He sees less and less of Cecil, but this is to be expected. And he learns something important ahead of everyone else, something that Cecil won’t actually share on the radio.

Cecil comes over to visit with the new baby. His name is Holden and he is three months old. Steve and Betty already have a daughter, Anne, who is starting first grade next year. Steve wanted to name her Dagny but Betty flat out refused.

When Betty takes Holden upstairs for a nap Cecil broaches the subject. “I don’t want you to be offended by this, but um ... I’d like to change my emergency contact to Carlos. Not because I don’t appreciate everything you’ve done for me, but – “

“Cecil, this is not something you have to explain.”

“ – A-Are you sure?”

“I’m happy for you. You deserve someone like Carlos, and if he was going to be a spaz about simple requests, he doesn’t deserve you.” Steve would never, ever say that Cecil needs a helper because of his limitations. Cecil needs someone in his life because he deserves someone in his life, someone just for him, who is a friend but also almost everything else a person could be. Steve is married, so he knows all this.

When Cecil has his bracelet replaced, he gives Steve the old one.

~~

Steve is thirty-four. His best friend is Cecil Palmer, who is getting married. Steve is his best man. He does not believe that anything is an accident anymore.

 The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Steve’s daughter is named Anne after the name Ayn (pronounced with the emphasis on the Y) is rejected. His first choice, Dagny, is the name of the female protagonist of Ayn Rand’s famous work of nonsense, Atlas Shrugged.
> 
> Steve’s son is named after Holden Caufield, the protagonist of Catcher in the Rye.
> 
> I set Night Vale in Alaska because screw it, we don’t know where Night Vale is.


End file.
